After what seemed an unbearable amount of time, she heard the car door open and then slam shut. She swallowed as footsteps approached from the walkway, hoping against hope they were not headed for 124. The footsteps grew louder, then slowed. Genevieve was trying to prepare for what she would say—but she knew it was no use. Ms. Pierce would call the police and have her arrested for breaking and entering.

Could she sneak through the living room and out a back entrance? Was there even a back entrance? But she was already out of time. Ms. Pierce had reached the doorstep, and Genevieve needed to act now, otherwise the substitute would notice the unlocked door and call for help, or worse, she would walk in, flip the light switch, see Genevieve standing in her living room, and scream.

Genevieve flipped on the lights and said loudly, “Ms. Pierce? Please don’t scream! It’s Genevieve Winterland; I’m not dangerous!”

From the other side of the door a thoroughly perplexed voice, way too deep to belong to the substitute, said, “Miss Winterland?”

Her jaw dropped. She flung open the door. “Mr. Mattison?”

They stood looking at each other in confusion and disbelief. The principal was dressed in jeans and a thick gray sweater; Genevieve had never seen him without a tie.

“What on earth are you doing here?” he asked, his face quickly morphing from confusion to incredulity to sternness. “I am assuming, from your statement, that you were not invited. Hence, you entered this property illegally.”

Genevieve flushed but stood firm. “I was concerned,” she said, “and with good reason. First, Miss Love disappears, and now Ms. Pierce.”

Mr. Mattison sighed and rubbed a hand wearily over his face. “Miss Winterland,” he said in a gentler tone, “I understand and appreciate your concern. You’re a very thoughtful young lady. But I’m afraid your imagination is a bit overblown.”

Genevieve drew breath to speak, but Mr. Mattison held his hand up sharply. “I, too, am curious as to why I’ve been unable to reach our esteemed substitute teacher, but not so much that I’d risk arrest for breaking and entering into her apartment. It’s very likely that Ms. Pierce simply does not wish to be disturbed and that she has chosen to finally retire, which she certainly deserves to do. I came here merely to leave a note, since she hasn’t been answering her phone and her voicemail appears to be full.”

Listening to the principal, Genevieve felt a creeping sense of doubt at her rash decision to race here in the night, and then to break into Ms. Pierce’s home. What had she been thinking? Yet there’d been something. Something tangible and sincere had led her to this moment, or so she’d thought. Had her instincts been completely wrong?

“Miss Winterland?” Mr. Mattison said softly.

The principal was staring at her with an almost pleading look; a bead of sweat had formed on his forehead, and she realized she had placed him in quite an awkward predicament. “Please. Before we’re both arrested.” He held out his hand. Genevieve stepped out onto the porch, and the principal turned to walk back to his car.

She was reaching behind her to shut the door when she heard the sounds. A pitiful mewling coming from the back of the apartment—cries of such abject misery they could not be ignored, no matter the fact that Genevieve’s blood had turned to ice and her skin was beginning to crawl.

Very slowly, as if in a dream, Genevieve turned and stepped back into the still-dark room.

“Miss Winterland!” came the principal’s voice—a faint echo in the roaring between her ears. She ignored him and drifted through the front room, slowly, slowly, pulled toward the soft mewling cries, and at the same time repelled by them. Her heart pounded beneath her ribs, her breath came in short, staccato bursts, and her nostrils flared at the smell she hadn’t noticed before.

“Miss Winterland!” Mr. Mattison’s voice now called sharply.

Genevieve heard footsteps pounding behind her. “Miss Winterland, this is highly inapprop⁠—”

She wrenched away from his hand on her shoulder and turned the corner of the hallway. There was a doorway. She walked through it. She found the light switch to the bedroom—where the cries had grown louder, where the smell had grown stronger. She flipped the switch.

Genevieve screamed.

The body of Ms. Pierce hung in the doorway of the closet, strung on a rope by her neck. On a small table beside the body lay a cat, curled in a ball and obviously weak with distress. At Genevieve’s cry, the cat tumbled to the floor and approached on unsteady feet; she scooped him up and cuddled him to her chest, keeping her eyes averted from the gruesome scene in the closet.

Mr. Mattison’s breath came in loud, distressed gasps.

“My god. Miss Winterland. Don’t—don’t look. You need to step out of here.”

Genevieve tried to move but could only sink onto the bed, cradling the cat in her lap, who pressed itself to her as if its life depended on her.

She heard Mr. Mattison speaking to someone—he’d called the police. Then, chest heaving, he approached the closet and, with violently shaking fingers, sawed through the rope with a pocket knife. Although he lowered the teacher’s body with as much gentleness as possible, there was still a sickening finality and lack of dignity to the way her heavy body thumped to the ground.

Mr. Mattison gave a cry of dismay and raced to the bathroom, where Genevieve heard, through her fog, the sounds of him being sick.

In an effort to look anywhere but at the dead body, Genevieve scanned the small bedroom. Ms. Eloise Pierce appeared to have led a simple life, and much of it seemed to center around her cat. Framed pictures on the walls showed the black and white feline in various poses—sprawled on his back with his paws stretched toward the camera, leaping mid-air to swat at a ball that had blurred in motion, sleeping peacefully on an embroidered pillow. The substitute had never even mentioned her cat, and Genevieve wondered, did the woman have anyone to share that information with?

Reluctantly, she allowed her gaze to travel back toward the body lying in a crumpled heap on the ground. Genevieve’s eyes widened. On the table by the closet was a folded piece of paper. It looked so out of place in the otherwise tidy room. Well, tidy except for the dead body on the floor, Genevieve thought, and fought back a wildly inappropriate urge to burst out laughing. She was sure, with a sudden clarity, that the folded piece of paper was a suicide note. She knew she shouldn’t touch it. The police would be here any minute, any second, and it was their job to handle the note.

But what could possibly have driven the ornery old woman to hang herself and leave behind her beloved cat? Surely it couldn’t be the matter of not landing a position teaching ungrateful students economics at Pinewood High.

Genevieve frowned and looked away. None of her business. The cat in her lap had curled up into a ball again and fallen asleep, and Genevieve patted his head absently. Soon she could hear sirens and the sound of the toilet flushing as Mr. Mattison finished tossing up the last of his dinner.

Suddenly, curiosity got the better of her and Genevieve sprang to her feet; the poor cat dropped to the floor with a yowl of protest. It was now or never. She simply had to see what was written on that note. She crossed the room, stepped around the dead body, and picked up the square of paper.

Genevieve unfolded it. She read it in shocked horror three times before looking in the closet. There, just as the note described, was a clear plastic bag stuffed with clothes. Genevieve stared at the bag, noting the familiar black pumps, smeared with blood. The sounds of the sirens screamed outside, and all at once the room was filled with paramedics and uniformed officers.

Principal Mattison was standing, pale and mute, in the doorway. Someone took the note from Genevieve’s hand and gently led her aside. Someone else was asking her questions. But she didn’t know the answers. She didn’t know anything. All she knew was if the note was correct, and the bloody bag of clothes suggested that it was, then Miss Love was dead, her body at the bottom of Valentine Lake.

CHAPTER SEVEN

AN UNLIKELY SUSPECT

Genevieve was sitting on Brandon’s couch, her legs tucked under her, a plate of untouched blueberry waffles on her lap. She hadn’t had the heart to refuse Mrs. Summers’s offer of breakfast, but the last thing she wanted to do was eat. 

Her father had urged her to stay home from school, but Genevieve, haunted all night by dreams and memories of Ms. Pierce’s body, the bloody bag of clothes, and visions of Miss Love at the bottom of the lake, had been driven from bed at four-thirty a.m. She’d tried outrunning the images in the crisp morning air. It hadn’t worked.

“Hey.” Brandon emerged from his bedroom, freshly showered. The room filled with the clean scent of soap. He came over, shaking water from his shaggy russet hair and pulled a long-sleeved T-shirt over his head.

Genevieve set the plate of waffles on the coffee table and Butterscotch hopped up on the couch, sprawling across her lap. The dog looked shamelessly back and forth from Genevieve to the coffee table. Brandon sat next to them.

“You okay?” he asked, taking the plate of waffles and slicing off a piece for himself. In an impressive display of speed and agility, Butterscotch jerked her head and snatched it from his fork. “Hey!” Brandon cried, and Genevieve burst into laughter. She hugged the dog to her gratefully, and when her giggles died down, she felt better.

“I just keep imagining Miss Love… you know.”

Brandon nodded. “Now I feel kind of bad for bringing Dillon into this. If I hadn’t, you never would have gone there last night.” He looked at her reproachfully. “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me you were going.”

She flinched. “Sorry. It was a spur of the moment thing.”

“Like picking the lock on that apartment? Pretty reckless.”

“Okay, okay!” she said. Part of the reason she hadn’t told him was because she’d anticipated his reaction—he would have tried to stop her. “Anyway, if I hadn’t gone, who knows how long it would’ve been before either body was discovered. And that poor cat...” she added, appealing to Brandon’s weak spot for animals.

It worked—his face softened. “You said one of the officers took the cat?”

“Officer Stevens,” she said, nodding. “He assured me he’d be taken care of.”

Brandon sawed off another piece of waffle, halved it, offered one piece to Butterscotch and slowly began chewing the other. “Do you think they’ll find Miss Love?”

The warm scent of blueberry syrup had become tantalizing and Genevieve, her appetite getting the better of her, reached for the plate. Brandon handed it over with exaggerated reluctance and she speared the remaining piece of waffle. “I suppose they will. I overheard the detective saying something about dragging the lake as early as this morning.”